eDJ Contributor: Greg Buckles
Posts by Greg Buckles
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- January 31st
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Re-Discover LTNY 2012 – Name that Booth
In case you could not make THE legal technology conference, LTNY 2012, I thought that I would bring the show to life for you. The eDJ Group’s day kicked off far too early with our eDJ Peer Group breakfast, but we had good attendance and great participation in the open discussion. The team then dove into analyst/press briefings on many (but not all) of the new product releases, which we will boil down for you in the days following the show. I decided to try to abandon my laptop and Moleskine notebook this time. I tried out every iPad note taking app I could pay for that promised to accurately recognize my sanscrit scrawl and render it into searchable text. Utter failure. For those of you from the early EDD days, remember the first generation of OCR programs and wince. That’s about how bad they are. To make it worse, I became obsessed with ditching the ever-present backpack or LTNY trash bag. So I actually shopped for an iPad ‘holster’ and bought an STM sleeve that promised to provide easy, safe storage without the ever present shoulder strap. However, my fashion faux-paux was quickly spotted by my kind team-mates who reminded me that I was wearing a geek man-purse.
posted at 2:40am on Jan 31st
- January 27th
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eDiscovery’s Unexpected Loss: Ursula Talley
As most of us are getting ready to brave the cold and crowds of LTNY 2012, I received sad news that Ursula Talley passed away last night while fighting recently diagnosed cancer. As the VP of Marketing for StoredIQ, Ursula was the outward face of StoredIQ and a key player in the platform’s evolution since 2007. I always enjoyed working with Ursula, first as a Symantec business partner during my Product Manager days and then later as an analyst client. I last visited with Ursula at her October StoredIQ Industry Advisory Board and was lucky enough to get there early for a talk before round table kicked off. She will be missed and I encourage everyone who knew her to raise a glass to her memory and to appreciate the relationship opportunities that our business and life presents us.
posted at 4:23pm on Jan 27th
- January 20th
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Unexpected Challenges of Enterprise Remote Collection
The astronomical growth in corporate data has driven the practice of eDiscovery away from just the forensic imaging of physical hard drives. The first systems for remote collection of email containers, Office files and other ESI from desktops, laptops and servers appeared in the 2004-2006 time period. I might have been one of the earliest beta testers for Guidance’s Encase Enterprise platform when I was managing the litigation technology for El Paso Corporation back then. Since then, the market has seen a wide variety of new appliances, just-in-time apps and other remote collection technologies. Most appear to promise a ‘push button’ automated collection by IT or Legal with minimal or no impact to working users. Legal sets the scope (date ranges, file types, names or search terms), and the system does all the work in the background. I just wish that it was that easy in the wild west of real world enterprise environments.
posted at 11:00am on Jan 20th
- January 17th
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Authenticating Your eDiscovery Web Resources
So where do you get your eDiscovery news from? Obviously you get some of it from the eDiscovery Journal, but no one should rely on any one source. A while back, my friend Browning Marean complimented me on a blog post. Turns out, he reads my blogs from another website. Luckily, that site at least attributed my blogs to me. It got me thinking about how easy it is to get high search ranking with the right domain name. Google and Bing have gotten smart about having multiple web addresses that redirect users to your site, so one ‘best’ practice for SEO optimization is to create microsites that reinforce your brand/message/perspective through proxy domain registrations.
posted at 11:01am on Jan 17th
- January 4th
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Who Owns the eDiscovery Hot Seat – Corporate or Counsel?
The vast majority of our corporate clients are public corporations with inside counsel. Generally we work directly under inside counsel’s supervision to protect our work product. A fast assessment engagement for a smaller corporation without any inside counsel got me thinking about eDiscovery risk vs. cost decisions in a different light. Civil litigation is a ‘sooner or later’ fact of life for any public corporation with enough revenue to tempt a plaintiff. As eDiscovery becomes a defacto business process, what hat is the typical inside counsel wearing when they make decisions on matter scope, filters, data sources and more? We tend to think of counsel as the final arbitrators of eDiscovery decisions. But frequently, inside counsel is wearing the business hat when applying the ‘reasonable effort’ standard to situations. In a company without inside counsel, who does that final decision fall to?
posted at 9:00am on Jan 4th
- December 27th
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Practical QC in eDiscovery
One key element for transforming your eDiscovery from an ad hoc reactive fire drill into a mature, proactive business process is the development and implementation of formal Quality Assurance(QA) and Quality Control(QC). I have always viewed QA as tackling ongoing process improvement such as regular cross case comparisons, while QC tends to be checking on did the process perform properly. Basically, how can we make the process better versus did everything work right? When interviewing corporate client eDiscovery teams, everyone is conscious of the need for QA/QC, but the vast majority seem to feel that it is impractical or unrealistic given their tight deadlines, lack of resources and typical fire-fighter mentality. Some law firm clients have swung to the opposite extreme, with elaborate workflow, check lists, physical chain of custody forms and more. Their QC has grown out of reasonable proportion and their productivity suffers because their overall QA has been neglected. So how do we achieve a reasonable quality process without bringing the legal process to a halt?
posted at 10:02am on Dec 27th
- December 19th
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Congress Says eDiscovery Not a Burden – What Do You Think?
It seems that Congress feels the need to weigh in on the costs of eDiscovery. Articles from LTN, CMSwire, Law.com and many other bloggers take many different perspectives on the commentary and Q&A session. We went to the House report to try to extract some of the highlights. My biggest take away is that we really do not have any solid metrics and objective market data on the true cost of eDiscovery. The comments focused on the cost and burden of preservation, especially on matters that never become actual litigation. Republican subcommittee members stressed the costs while Democrats questioned the relevance and corporate donor origin of the hearing itself in light of the active rule evaluation by the Judicial Conference. So here are some of the notable statements with my own perspective on them.
posted at 12:01pm on Dec 19th
- December 12th
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Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? – Part 2
Continued from Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? – Part 1…
The second concern regards how to move the actual data to and from the Cloud storage. Many providers will tell you that you can just upload your data directly via web or ftp. STOP HERE. Normal File Transfer Protocol or web page upload is NOT protected. So use an SFTP equivalent or better yet look at the previous paragraph and only send encrypted packages. Internet backbone speeds still limit the practical size of uploads to 5-10 GB unless you have a dedicated pipe to your provider. Data uploads that take longer than 1-2 hours may crash or bog down your own network. eDiscovery performance is all about getting that large collection on line for review as fast as possible. But just as the speed and performance wars died from lack of interest, I think that most legal users have come to understand that it may take a day or two to properly handle and process potential evidence. While service providers and certain global corporations may have a high proportion of large (>10 GB) collections or productions, a quick check with a couple clients revealed that only 10-15% of their collections might need to be loaded directly by the host. I wrote a piece last year about how Fedex may be the true winner in the migration to the cloud.
posted at 9:10am on Dec 12th
- December 5th
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Why Not Move Your eDiscovery to the Cloud? – Part 1
In my last post, we explored the relative cost of Amazon S3 Cloud storage compared to traditional hosting provider costs. Despite the potential cost savings of servers and storage in ‘The Cloud’, I am not yet seeing many firms or corporations jumping to move their eDiscovery to the Cloud. In a recent analyst briefing on our eDJ top 2012 eDiscovery Trends, Barry Murphy posited that legal and compliance resisted the leap beyond the firewall until they had more public success stories and caselaw. So what are they worried about? Data security was the first concern of a recent law firm client. “How can I assure my client’s that their sensitive ESI is safe and that we are not inadvertently waiving privilege?” Good question. So I went looking for a good answer.
posted at 9:46am on Dec 5th
- November 29th
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Will Amazon S3 Rain on eDiscovery Hosted Providers?
The cost of storage has come up in several recent engagements for firms and corporations. I started thinking about while we were brainstorming in preparation for our recent webinar on enabling expiry on archives. Calculating a Return on Investment (ROI) on a legal hold initiative includes the recovered cost of storage when you can eliminate 40-80% of your non-records. It was pointed out that storage costs have dropped so much that eDiscovery costs have superseded them as the primary motivation for cleaning house. My panelists trotted out several figures ($/GB) from well known analysts for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of storage. I feel that Amazon S3, Rackspace and other global cloud services have clearly set the market price on storage at less than 15¢/GB. Yep, that’s right 15¢/GB. I can recall early eDiscovery hosting RFP’s at $30-50/GB/Month for online storage. That was just for storage, but it made an easy argument for in-house systems when many matters can run for 2-3 years or longer. Hosting providers generally lead with their processing and review offerings and tend to bury the ongoing storage costs deep in their bids, even though these recurring costs can represent the highest margin item on the engagement.
posted at 9:30am on Nov 29th